Found Footage Festival Makes a Stop at MASS MoCA
NORTH ADAMS, Mass. - Continuing MASS MoCA's summer outdoor film series, film collectors Joe Pickett and Nick Prueher will host their hilarious found video collection - clips from films gathered from dumpsters, thrift stores, garage sales and warehouses across the country.
The Found Footage Festival will screen in Courtyard C on the largest movie screen in the Berkshires (moving indoors if rain threatens) on Thursday, August 20, at 8:30 PM. Film Threat Review comments "This is the true underground cinema - films and videos that, for the most part, are not produced for the general viewing public. If you want to see something truly different and disturbing, the Found Footage Festival has what you're looking for en masse".
Pickett and Prueher began collecting video footage in 1999 when they discovered an Inside and Outside Custodial Duties training video in a break room at a McDonald's. Once they had amassed a few more video gems, the duo began spending Friday nights showing off their found footage to friends and entertaining themselves with the ridiculousness, outrageousness, and stupidity of the videos. In an interview for Columbus Alive, Prueher said, "We were like, everyone has to see this, so we'd invite friends over to my parents' living room."
After becoming a hometown hit, the pair began traveling the country picking through "junk" to find their "gold". Prueher explains, "We thought, if there's something this outlandishly stupid right under our noses, imagine what else is out there? That kind of started the quest to turn up more VHS relics in thrift stores and garage sales and garbage cans and other out-of-the-way places." When Pickett and Prueher find something intriguing they lock themselves in a room and force themselves to watch the videos, attempting not to fast forward. From hours of film, they select short clips, then combine them with commentary for an evening-length collection of found footage pieces.
Because the duo has been so successful in finding videos, they've had to create some criteria for the clips selected for the DVD and tours. Prueher says, "One, it has to be legitimately found. We don't take anything off the internet. These are all physical tapes that either we or somebody else found, because the stories of how they're found are sometimes as interesting as what's on the tape." The majority of the videos "come from that golden age of home video, the '80s and '90s, when it was so cheap to produce and there were all these weird, esoteric things showing up. These are generally home videos, promotional and industrial videos, stuff that's meant to be watched alone in a living room or conference room, so there's something really entertaining about taking them out of that context and putting them in a theater with 300 people."
The footage screened at MASS MoCA will include such clips as: It Only Takes a Second, a safety video from Federated Mutual Insurance; outtakes from Winnebago promotional videos featuring a foul-mouthed host named Jack Rebney; Harvey Sid Fisher music videos of songs describing the zodiac; clips of the public access television show Stairway to Stardom; selections from Carnival in Rio, a 1983 TV travelogue featuring Arnold Schwarzenegger; and more.
When they are not working their "real" jobs -- Prueher works at The Colbert Report in addition to writing freelance, and Pickett works for The Onion -- the duo takes their footage on the road across the US and Canada adding commentary and observations to the footage. Prueher and Pickett have produced three volumes of Found Footage Festival, in addition to their first feature documentary Dirty Country, which won the 24 Beats Per Second Audience Award at the 2007 South By Southwest Film Festival.
Found Footage Festival is part of MASS MoCA's Thursday night film series which also includes The Best of Iron Mule Short Comedy Film Festival on August 6, Purple Rain Sing-A-Long on August 13 and Labyrinth Sing-a-Long on August 27. All Thursday night films begin at 8:30 P.M., and tickets are $10. Patrons who buy tickets to three of the films can attend the fourth in the series for free.
Tickets for Found Footage Film Festival are $10. MASS MoCA members receive a 10% discount. Tickets are available through the MASS MoCA Box Office located off Marshall Street in North Adams, open from 10 AM - 6 PM every day. Tickets can also be charged by phone by calling 413-662-2111 during Box Office hours or purchased on line at www.massmoca.org.
